Papers by Kärg Kama
The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, 2021
This chapter examines what makes oil shales a resource. In line with growing scholarly interests ... more This chapter examines what makes oil shales a resource. In line with growing scholarly interests in time as inherent to resource-making, the chapter accounts for “resourceness” as a liminal and transient quality, which renders resources not only materially but also temporally distributed. While oil shales have been explored in the quest for new fossil fuel supplies since the early nineteenth century, production has recurrently failed to gain traction and persevered only in limited cases. However, rather than becoming obsolete, their geological potential continues to lure both national politics and speculative capital as an alternative energy economy to come, once petroleum scarcity and rising prices have rendered unconventional sources more viable. To foreground these contending registers of time, I describe how the resourceness of oil shales is assembled, perpetuated and multiplied through an interplay of the industry’s past legacies and future projections. I note that insomuch as these temporal techniques of (un)making the resource hinge on the presence of concrete evidence of actual production, they are also defined by absence, the immaterial, and the virtual.
Progress in Human Geography, 2019
Advancing relational accounts of 'resource-making' processes by deploying insights from science a... more Advancing relational accounts of 'resource-making' processes by deploying insights from science and technology studies, this article outlines crucial new lines of inquiry for geographical research on unconventional fossil fuels. The exploitation of various carbon-rich substitutes for hydrocarbons has rapidly expanded over the last two decades, to become a highly contentious issue which augments scientific dissensus and generates new collective engagements with the subsurface. The article invites geographers to examine the epistemically and politically transformative potential of such resource-making controversies in terms of reconfiguring: the production of geoscientific knowledge, anticipation of post-conventional energy systems, and temporal strategies of (de)economizing extractive futures.
Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life, 2019
This chapter explores the relationship between geoscientific knowledge production and geopolitica... more This chapter explores the relationship between geoscientific knowledge production and geopolitical agencies in the making of new subsurface resources, specifically unconventional fossil fuels. Focusing on recent controversies surrounding the assessment of potential shale gas resources in Europe, we analyse the ways in which highly speculative and contested resource estimates have come to inform the geopolitical imagination of many EU states and, in turn, provided a new impetus for geoscientific inventories and exploration of shale formations. In the first part of the chapter, we engage with recent volumetric accounts in political geography and cognate disciplines to conceptualize these epistemic struggles of resource-making as a case of “subterranean geo-politics”. The empirical analysis in the second part then traces the geo-politics of shale gas prospecting in Poland and the UK, describing how volumetric projections of resource abundance have become undermined by diverse materialities and sociopolitical constructions of the subsurface. This is evidenced by the difficulties of translating knowledge across geo-economically disparate sites of resource development, notably the failure to apply the US-based expertise to the European context. Finally, we document more recent efforts by the European Commission and other epistemic authorities to overcome the deficiency and incompatibility of local resource estimates by developing standard, EU-specific geo-metrics for shale energy assessment.
Engaging with nascent scholarly efforts to foreground the ‘geo’ of geopolitics, this article exam... more Engaging with nascent scholarly efforts to foreground the ‘geo’ of geopolitics, this article examines how certain low-quality geological substances are constituted as strategic, ‘unconventional’ fossil fuel resources, the exploitation of which is deemed indispensable for energy security reasons. Based on a detailed study of oil shale exploitation in Estonia, the paper specifically analyses the politics of knowledge that enable such carbon-intensive and energy-inefficient industries to perpetuate at the national level and consequently subvert the neoliberal imperatives of energy sector deregulation and decarbonization arising from EU policies. This analysis leads to two key arguments. At one level, the Estonian case evidences and contextualizes the growing recognition that ‘energy security’ represents a multi-faceted and dynamic construct as it highlights, in particular, the contingency of expert knowledge in its conceptualisation and performance. What counts as energy security is in this case articulated via shifting and contested modes of knowledge-making, whereby state- and market-led modes of energy governance are continuously renegotiated. At another level, however, the politics of knowledge is explained here as exercised through contending ontologies of the fossil fuel resource that pivots security claims, or ‘geo-logics’, which has multiplying effects on resource materiality.
Area, Jan 5, 2015
This article investigates the reinvention of electrical and electronic waste as a resource in the... more This article investigates the reinvention of electrical and electronic waste as a resource in the context of the EU market economy. It argues that the European regulatory framework is underpinned by a particular vision of ‘circular economy’ that both internalises e-waste within formal economic circuits and confines its exchange to the territory of the single market. Yet the boundaries of this economic regime continue to be highly permeable, as the terminus of two thirds of the products placed on the market remains unaccounted for, said to dissipate via various loopholes in waste collection and treatment. Based on analysis of the policy rationale and praxis, the article relates this failure to the fact that e-waste is identified in ambiguous terms as comprising both socio-ecological risk and economic value, or what is termed here the ‘logic of hazard’ and the ‘logic of resource’. The making of resources from potentially hazardous materials hinges on the extent to which incremental quantities of end-of-life equipment can be translated into a uniform tradable good, the movements of which are documented, calculated and monitored through standard methods. The two logics are complementary insofar as they legitimise the spatial enclosure of e-waste trade, but they can also come into conflict, since the double identity of e-waste complicates the reframing of market boundaries and generates different objects of regulation. The case study advances geographical research on materials and ‘marketization’, enabling the materiality of e-waste to be conceptualised as both a product of and obstacle to the territorial b/ordering of the market.
Global Energy: Issues, Potentials, and Policy Implications
Geoforum, Dec 25, 2013
The difficulties of organizing emissions trading in line with the principles of economics have le... more The difficulties of organizing emissions trading in line with the principles of economics have led economic sociologists to interrogate the significance of political compromises and technical conditions to the performance of markets. This article argues that sociological studies of ‘techno-politics’ should be complemented with a geographical perspective concerned with how such market experiments are territorialized in relation to wider socio-technically distributed practices. Focusing on the setup of a regionally concentrated and integrated European market for carbon, it investigates a particular compromise made between climate and energy policies in the post-2012 trading rules for the electricity sector: a nexus created between the risks of energy insecurity, competitive disadvantage, and ‘carbon leakage’. The resistance of EU border states to carbon pricing has enabled ‘carbon leakage’ to be re-conceptualized as a threat of transferring electricity generation to non-market suppliers, which reinforces state-centred strategies of carbon-intensive production. This case evidences three fundamentally spatial predicaments of technopolitics, contributing to geographical studies of marketization. Firstly, the politics of allocating emissions allowances is exacerbated by the territorial premises of the market that bring neoliberal forms of governing climate change into conflict with state sovereignty claims. Secondly, the technical aspects of calculating carbon exchange cannot be dissociated from other transboundary modes of circulation in the market region, such as electricity transmission networks. Thirdly, experiments with carbon marketization can have spatially differentiated effects, challenging the enclosure of market territory and creating a contentious ‘frontier region’ with distinct trading rules on the borders of the market.
Book Reviews by Kärg Kama
Journal of International Development, Apr 29, 2015
Conference Papers [available upon request] by Kärg Kama
My intention in this paper is to analyse the relationship between diverse ‘geo-logics’ and ‘geo-p... more My intention in this paper is to analyse the relationship between diverse ‘geo-logics’ and ‘geo-politics’, which characterizes the development of new geological resources, such as unconventional oil and gas resources. The first term invites us to account for the contending geoscientific knowledge practices and related interventions through which largely under-explored subsurface materials become enacted and acted upon as a resource, or what can also be termed as the ‘ontological politics of resource-making’. The second term is utilized here to further examine the extent to which such geoscientific knowledge controversies have potential to reconfigure conventional forms of politics around extractive industries, leading to new knowledge polities, collective identities and geo-political associations.
The material properties of resources have become increasingly recognized in the geographical lite... more The material properties of resources have become increasingly recognized in the geographical literature as a disruptive element that impedes the commodification and financialization of nature. The concept of resource materiality, however, remains largely under-theorised, being typically understood as the bio- or geophysical remainder of resources that precedes their socio-economic ordering. In this paper, I suggest that we need to explore more closely what in fact makes up the ‘bio/geophysical’ and how this relates to the making of resource economies, drawing upon relational-constructivist theories and my own research on ‘unconventional’ fossil fuel resources. I argue that unconventional fuels offer useful insights into these questions, because their development has hitherto been marginal to established extractive economies, but increasingly been associated with global capital and resource speculation, arguably without a need to always demonstrate the possibility of large-scale exploitation or even the usability of their products. Nevertheless, closer studies indicate that the industry still needs to draw upon some sort of tangible evidence in order to realize its otherwise virtual promises. Broadly speaking then, my paper calls for a renewed investigation as to whether materiality still matters in an apparently financialised sector, and how we might want to reconceptualize materiality in turn.
Theses/Dissertations by Kärg Kama
Drafts by Kärg Kama
Recent work in resource geography and anthropology has demonstrated the need to move beyond issue... more Recent work in resource geography and anthropology has demonstrated the need to move beyond issues of resource control and distribution toward a critical examination of how resources are made (Bridge 2013, Kama 2013, Li 2014, Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014. A focus on resource-making draws attention to the distributed quality of resources as always in-becoming, rather than biophysically or geophysically given, substances. It also reveals their indeterminate and often speculative nature as the outcome of a variety of techno-scientific, governmental, entrepreneurial, and financial practices (e.g. Majury 2014, Valdivia 2015, Weszkalnys 2015, Zalik 2015). Inherent to this process of resource-making are important temporal aspects, which have remained remarkably underexplored. In this session, we take the existing literature as a springboard to ask new questions about the multiple temporalities generated by processes of resource-making ranging from anticipations of resource matters, to their diverse retentions, to other temporal and material states once processed or unmade as a resource.
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Papers by Kärg Kama
Book Reviews by Kärg Kama
Conference Papers [available upon request] by Kärg Kama
Theses/Dissertations by Kärg Kama
Drafts by Kärg Kama